Choose life … Wham! took larking about to evangelical levels.
Photograph: ITV / Rex Features

More than any other group, Wham! were regarded as an exemplar of high 80s, home counties Britain – tanned and wealthy, hedonistic, defiantly apolitical in an age of change. With three decades’ hindsight, knowing that George Michael gave bunches of concert tickets away to NHS nurses, knowing that he recorded a brace of anti-Iraq war singles, and recalling that Wham! played a miners’ benefit concert at the height of their fame, it’s hard to think of a group who have been more misunderstood.

Wham! rose to fame in 1982, the era of New Pop, a term the critic Paul Morley had coined for an artist-led reclamation of the charts and light entertainment. Released on the tichy indie label Innervision, their 1982 debut Wham! Rap was an NME single of the week, critically revered for its cri de coeur: “I’m a soul boy! I’m a dole boy!” George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were using a blue-eyed soul template, like revered New Pop practitioners ABC or the Associates, but married this to lyrics and public performances that were at all times about fun. Time revealed Michael to be a far more complex man, a gentle revolutionary in terms of political pop and a balladeer to match almost anyone, but with his pal Ridgeley as a crutch, the emotions were all positive with Wham! The group’s slogan was “Choose Life”, writ large on oversize Persil-white T-shirts.

Michael’s easy humour was one of his greatest tools, and would later be used to political ends with Shoot the Dog, and to wink back at the authorities on Outside. With Wham! it was used constantly; Wake Me Up Before You Go Go could have been from a musical, a set-piece from Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, and name-dropped the none-smilier Doris Day. The best track on their 1983 debut Fantastic was called A Ray of Sunshine, and it truly was, brightly blinding fans and critics to the second album’s take-down of consumerism, Credit Card Baby, or the brittle disgust of Everything She Wants. Wham! did not hide their light under a bushel, though – they took larking about to evangelical levels. In this respect, they were the closest any British act has come to the early Beach Boys.

And, as with the early Beach Boys, the darkness and doubt were in there if you looked beyond pictures of George and Andrew with shuttlecocks down their shorts; pointing to future classics like A Different Corner was the lush, rain-washed unhappiness (“I need your love to hide me”) of Like a Baby. Around 1984, George Michael went on kids’ TV and declared that his favourite record was Joy Division’s Closer. This may not seem especially outre now, but at the time it seemed so unlikely that it was difficult to process – it certainly didn’t lead to any critical rereading of Wham!’s output.

Their appearance at a miners’ strike benefit at London’s Royal Festival Hall in September 1984 was treated by the media like a mistake, as if they’d thought they were doing a Radio 1 Roadshow and walked through the wrong stage door: “Dressed in white and posturing farcically,” wrote Melody Maker, “Wham! greatly pleased the three rows of young girls at the back of the hall and left everybody else stone-faced and baffled.” Unlike the bulk of the show’s Red Wedge-based lineup, their position was reinvention through optimism, breaking through darkness by laughing out loud. Yet Wham! were just as aware of how dreadful the government was as any dour indie band.

So when they wore their hearts so obviously on their sleeves, how were Wham! ever seen as Thatcherite? Their second album was called Make It Big, and the imperative title alone seemed to cement an “if you can’t beat them, join them” embrace of excess and empire building. Another way of reading the title, though, as Wham! Make It Big, gives it quite a different meaning. They had done, after all – a pair of friends from the nowhere suburban town of Bushey, near Watford, with a deep-rooted love for Stevie Wonder and the Isley Brothers had become the biggest pop act in the country: what wasn’t to like about that? Alternatively, given Wham!’s insistence on fun at all costs, it might just have been a Carry On-esque double entendre.

If Wham’s critical perception was down to semantics, its hardly surprising that Michael wanted to appear very much the serious artist on his early solo records, or that he called an album Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1.

Wham!’s relentless positivity didn’t sit easily alongside other records like the Special AKA’s Nelson Mandela or a swathe of nuclear oblivion hits – Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears in My Eyes, Frankie’s Two Tribes and Nena’s 99 Red Balloons – that fogged the charts in 1984 and 1985. The Smiths’ Panic was allegedly written by Morrissey after he heard Wham’s I’m Your Man follow a particularly bruising news bulletin on Radio 1 – this sunniness was seen as offensive, wilfully ignorant.

It turned out not to be ignorant at all. Wham’s attitude was summed up in the chorus of Ray of Sunshine – “Sometimes, wake up in the morning with a bassline, a ray of sunshine”. George Michael saw music as a way of life, it was joyous, and it could help you out of the darkest places. When he recorded covers – the Miracles’ Love Machine on Fantastic, solo recordings of Queen’s Somebody To Love and Elton John’s Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me – they were note-for-note faithful not out of a lack of imagination, but out of respect. When he announces, “ladies and gentlemen, Mr Elton John!” on the latter, it’s clear in his voice that he can scarcely believe he’s sharing the stage with his hero, another insecure Hertfordshire fanboy-turned-superstar. In the Wham! era this positivity was often regarded as gauche; over the years it became hugely endearing. George Michael kept faith in the power of pop, understood its healing powers, and wasn’t afraid to share that love.